Parents Blog

I'm not a duster, I don't do windows, and I hate vacuuming stairs, but I despise clutter even more. So my Martha Stewart talent is organizing. Every item in the house has a particular location. It's not exactly the Dewey Decimal System, but it does allow me to rapidly guide someone to an item or swiftly put my hands on it myself. However if people don't replace items exactly where they belong my system breaks down. Its fatal flaw takes the form of two sons and one husband, who expect me to know instantly where jackets, pencils, wallets, and car keys can be found, but steadfastly refuse to "reshelve" their products properly. If I was the only one in the house I could find a particular DVD in less than 10 seconds. But when Bryce asked if we had "All the President's Men" and I answered "Yes" I had no idea that this would lead to two hours of mucking through drawers, digging under couches, peering behind bookcases, and looking in more and more bizarre locations until finding it in the bathroom in the cupboard with the towels. Don't ask because I have no idea why it was there.

So it is little wonder that all my efforts to be organized about soccer have limited success. My initial idea was to organize uniforms into various backpacks. By the time the boys were 10, I already had to keep track of three different soccer teams for each of them, not to mention baseball and basketball team gear. Eventually the number swelled to five soccer teams – club team, indoor team, summer city league, Super Y League, and US Youth Soccer Olympic Development (US Youth Soccer ODP). I have shelves in the mudroom to hold the various backpacks and whenever I washed the uniforms they were packed away immediately in the appropriate bag. Cleats were stored on a shoe rack hung on the wall. Extra socks went into a box under the shelves. However, this organizational utopia disintegrated in a seismic wave of indifference to the rules.

In a domino effect of obliteration, each case of disorganization disrupted the entire system. Should one boy be asked to spend the night with a friend he would need an overnight bag. Never mind he already had an overnight bag because naturally it was stuffed in some dark recess of the closet or the garage or under the bed. So in a rush of expediency he would grab one of his soccer backpacks and dump it out. The uniforms ended up like so much flotsam and jetsam bobbing on the sea of clothes covering his bedroom floor. Later I would discover the bag on the mudroom floor and replace it on the shelf. Then he would grab the bag for US Youth Soccer ODP practice. As he rushed to get dressed on arrival we would discover a wad of dirty clothes, the Game Boy he had been missing for a week, a soggy bag of chips, and no US Youth Soccer ODP shirts. Cleats that should have been hanging on the rack seemingly sprouted legs and skittered like giant centipedes into the darkest, dankest, most undiscoverable corners of the house or car. The box full of socks held no pairs but plenty of mismatched and holey stockings. Our panicked scramble to find what we needed for any given event or game never seemed to disappear despite all my admonishments on how we could avoid this scene. On average the system worked about 20% of the time which I grew to accept as an admirable result.

The other day I was digging through some boxes in the basement. These were my privately organized clear plastic boxes labeled and complete. I was searching for a particular photo that I wanted to put in a new frame I'd received as a gift. Once I located the proper box and lowered it to the basement floor I knew immediately that it wasn't right. This box should have held stacks of photos organized by year and event, but I could see something decidedly not photographic at the top of the box. When I opened it I discovered two SYL team jerseys that we had had to replace despite days of searching. How they worked their way down to the basement and into the box of photos will remain a mystery, although I suspect it had something to do with needing to clean the basement quickly and finding an expedient, albeit inappropriate hidden storage spot. I will validate that theory sometime in the future when I find a pair of missing shoes in the box with maps and a missing MP3 player in the box with collectible magazines.

In reality organization ends up being about never losing anything. In that area I suspect I am close to 100%. The trick will be to discover where items have drifted, retrieve them, and return them to their rightful place. After cleaning out Bryce's room this summer I made huge progress in my success rate having discovered thirty plus DVDs, the charger for my cell phone, a box of game cartridges, and various missing utensils and glasses. Over time these items will once again begin to disappear, but for a few weeks I can pat myself on the back that I know right where to find "All the President's Men."

The U.S. Soccer National Staff Coaches, the state soccer association Technical Directors and the US Youth Soccer Coaching Department have Position Statements on several topics in the youth soccer realm. Here is one on appropriate playing ages for elite play.

Age of competitive play No. 4

While it is acknowledged and recognized that preteen players should be allowed to pursue playing opportunities that meet both their interest and ability level, we strongly discourage environments where players below the age of twelve are forced to meet the same ""competitive"" demands as their older counterparts therefore we recommend the following:

To maximize player potential, we believe that State Associations and progressive clubs should work to expose their better coaches, who should hold the "Y" License, to their youngest players. It is also seen as important that mentoring programs be established for community soccer coaches to improve the quality of youth soccer training.

The developmental approach emphasizes the growth of individual skills and group tactical awareness. We feel too much emphasis is placed on "team" play and competition in the preteen years. We believe in an inclusion model for preteen players. From this perspective, the goal of youth soccer programs at all levels is to include players in matches at an age when experience is more important than outcome.

Further options for players in their teen years that are not interested in competing at the highest level, but still have a love for the game should be created. Perhaps older teen coed teams or high school based teams on a recreational basis.

I don't believe much in statistics. As an undergraduate math minor I assisted a professor in proofing her textbook on probability and statistics. I'm well aware of the various statistical measures a researcher can use to create a favorable or unfavorable statistical result. Surveys can be carefully constructed to elicit skewed responses. Would you rather have a warehouse store in your neighborhood or a prisoner half-way house? Surprise! Survey shows overwhelming support for the construction of Costco. Or a political ad might go something like this: Joe Smith would be a powerful law and order district attorney because as a prosecutor he has had less than two per cent of his convictions overturned on appeal. What they fail to tell you is that his conviction rate is only one per cent. So when someone tells me what the numbers say, I'm naturally skeptical.

Those experts reading trends, interpreting spikes in surveys, watching registrations, recording attendance, and generally keeping their noses in the data don't "see" the big picture. The proof that youth soccer is flourishing in this country can be seen by anyone even if they don't have the benefit of the numbers. I trust the empirical evidence more than number crunching because it's my vision that I trust rather than some statistician's conclusion. True my observations aren't scientifically supported, yet pragmatic factors can carry more weight because everyone can judge for him or herself how reasonable the conclusions are. Following are three purely empirical indicators that youth soccer continues to expand.

This morning I was searching through the on screen TV guide for something interesting to watch while I cleaned my bedroom. When I spotted it, I couldn't believe it, but there it was – an entire half day of soccer - not on Fox Soccer Channel, not on ESPN's platoon of channels, not on any of the Spanish language channels, all of which are my usual haunts for finding soccer to watch. Instead it was on the Time-Warner Wisconsin Sports Channel famous for showing marathons of fishing programs and the occasional high school sports state final. Now they were showing the U.S Youth Soccer Wisconsin State Championships for U13 boys and girls, and not the finals mind you, but third round games. These were well-produced programs with two commentators, two cameras, and relatively sophisticated editing and graphics. It wasn't high definition but the commentators actually knew the players' names and talked intelligently about the teams, the coaching choices, and the on field strategies. Now I seriously doubt that a public service of the cable company would have abandoned their treasure trove of cheaply and easily produced fishing programs for this far more complicated and costly production unless they felt there was an audience for the series. After all they need to answer to their advertising sponsors of which there were at least ten. I might understand showing the final games of the older teams, but the fact that they expanded their coverage to all the age levels at the State Championships and to include third round and semi-final games as well tells me that youth soccer, at least in Wisconsin, is making an impact.

Speaking of advertisers, over the course of the last ten years there has been a huge increase of soccer related advertising, even for products that have little or nothing to do with soccer. Just this month an ad for a pain reliever begins with a grimacing woman being "side-lined" by headache pain. She then takes the product and is now on the "side-lines" of her child's soccer game. A decade ago the same campaign would have ended on the side-lines of a football game. At first blush soccer has little to do with a kitchen floor cleaner. But I'll admit anything that gets up the worst soccer cleat marks has an important connection to the sport, at least for me. I developed soccer parent knees from crawling around scrubbing the tiles in my kitchen. But the advertiser could have shown baseball cleats or football cleats or even track cleats. Instead it chose a soccer team to run across that poor kitchen floor.

While watching the crowds at a July 4th celebration I was struck by how many people were wearing soccer apparel. Now I suppose this approaches a statistical analysis, but I did finally decide to count the number of soccer shirts and shorts compared to the number of "other." Better than half the people were wearing some soccer gear. Just to prove my observations weren't skewed, I was not at a soccer team function or even near a soccer field. This was just a gathering of people from the town who came to eat corn on the cob, watch some fireworks, and flaunt their interest in soccer.

With approximately 3.8 million registered youth soccer players in the United States of which 3 million are registered with US Youth Soccer, a lot of kids with parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles are linked to soccer. That's a giant size target group. According to US Youth Soccer its membership has grown in thirty five years from 100,000 players to the 3 million today. That's just what the numbers say, but anyone with eyes and ears can bear witness to the increased influence of soccer on everyday life. Even President Obama takes time out from his schedule to go see his daughters play and has endorsed the U.S. bid to FIFA to host the 2018 World Cup. We last hosted in 1994 with a huge impact on interest in the sport in America. Just imagine what the 2018 World Cup in America could do to boost youth soccer interest even further. I'm sure people will create statistics to attempt to answer that question long before it actually happens. I say let's just wait and watch. If present observations are any indication I predict we may be seeing network feeds of U5 games by 2019!